Appunti intero esame di Cultura e Letteratura Inglese 2 - Prof.ssa Polopoli

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Cultura e letteratura inglese

Victorian age: introduzione

Almeno 1 (max. 2) testo antologico di Victorian Age — 2 letture integrali.

Victorian age (1837-1901)

The novel and the age

The Victorian Age is so called after the name of Queen Victoria, who was the one who rules the UK of Britain and Ireland for more than 60 years. The era covers the period that runs from 1837 (the year of Victoria’s birth) to 1901 (the year of Victoria’s death). Some critics believe this age should start in 1832, since it was in this year of the Reform Act. This period was marked by some dramatic changes that brought Britain’s to its highest growth; during these years Britain became the largest empire that has ever existed.

This period led some dramatic changes in politics, society, religion, etc. The period was marked by the transition from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy. The rapid growth of industrial cities was the result of industrialisation (which is, then, quite linked to urbanisation). However, the grandiose industrial growth was accompanied by labouring and living conditions which were often nothing short of horrendous: that’s why there will be the emergence of a powerful and extensive working-class movement, Chartism, protesting against the injustices of the industrial system and demanding a radical reform of Parliament. Their petitions were also ignored. However, social reforms were pressed for by the Trade Unions, which were legally recognised by the 1871 Trade Union Act and which were to give birth in 1893 to the Labour Party. This is also the period of the Education Act and of the Reform Bills (1832, 1867, 1884).

It is also important to say that the Victorian bourgeois society relegated women to the role of ‘angels of the hearth’ and promoted a bigot idea of decorum which excluded any reference whatsoever to sexuality. The other face of this moralism is illustrated by the massive increase in the number of prostitutes.

Victoria’s reign, finally, coincides with the phase of maximum colonial expansion: after the acquisition of almost all the Indian sub-continent, the Empire expanded into Afghanistan and the South China Sea, Sudan and part of East Africa, South Africa (1902). The independence movement led by Daniel O’Connell had acquired political rights for the Catholic population when the great famine of 1845-46 led to the death from starvation of millions of Irish people and the massive migration to the British mainland or to the USA. Ireland was to remain a colony until 1921.

Victorian age was a period of rapid transformation and profound change. There can’t be simple labels for a reign that begins with bishops in cauliflower wigs and end with people driving motor cars. The only key to this period of unprecedented change, is change itself.

The imperialist expansion created an empire of unprecedented size and might. The unprecedented increase of population. The rapid urbanisation as a result of industrialisation. The spectacular growth of industrial cities especially in the north of England. The industrial city and the railway engine are the most striking symbols of the age.

There’s no doubt that industrialisation re-shaped the landscape that led millions of people to industrial cities in order to work in factories. This situation also meant the growth of middle class, and the decline of aristocracy. Perhaps, the symbol that better describes Britain’s industrial change of this period is the locomotive, which introduced a new way of perceiving the two important coordinates of space and time. We can say that it introduced a fluid perception of both time and space. The relation between time and space is meant to change forever.

Optimism and hope

Optimism and hope constituted the ideological framework of a nation that by its enormous scientific and technological achievements inevitably believed that anything was possible. Darwin published ‘The Theory of Evolution’ (1859); The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London in 1851, exhibits technical and industrial advanced of the age.

This period was marked by hope and fate in progress; nevertheless, a deep insight into the age reveals that contradictory tendencies marked the era. Then, there’s both optimism and anxiety.

Divisioni del Victorian Age

According to a tripartite division of the period, Victorian Age can be divided as follows:

• Early Victorian period (1832-1851: change and crisis). This period was marked by change and crisis, but it was also marked by two important non-literary events: railway expanded, and the 1832 reform bill that gave voting rights to industrial cities (in favour of industrial cities and middle class). This can be defined as a period of troubles, mainly because industrialisation produced many social troubles (working conditions were deplorable for both men, women and children, the youth often worked in mines, and poor people lived in slums).
• Mid Victorian period (1851-1870: a period of balance). England was proud of its science, technology, progress (the period was marked by the invention of photography, telephone, telegraph – the Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolises England’s supremacy over the other countries in terms of progress.
• Later Victorian period (1870-1901: an age of anxiety). Marked by a general mood of anxiety and decay of Victorian beliefs, there was a general sense of dissatisfaction in a society in transition to other unknown destinations, less hopeful.

Prose fiction e il romanzo vittoriano

The supreme literary achievement of the Victorian age is in its prose fiction. Victorians were ‘novel reading’ people and novel was a very popular form. The story of the Victorian novel is the story of the novelists’ attempts to interpret their changing world. Novelists brought the crowded stuff of the world into their works.

The difficulty of generalising about Victoria novel is the same as generalising over the period itself: in fact, there’s a close relationship between Victorian novel and the age during which it was produced. The novel interprets its time and the society of its time; it also interprets the changes and the transformations of the era. In other words, though their novels Victorian novelists gave voice the hopes and fears of the time. We can also say that Victorian novel became sort of the magister vitae of the age. Its main aim was amusement, but it often had a didactic purpose. Of course, Victorian novelists were conscious of the fact that they were writing for a middle-class audience. Victorians read novels for escape and diversion. Mostly belonging to urban middle class and devoted more to commerce than literature, Victorian readers wanted to read realistic books, not too complex, that could be read by the whole family and that had a didactic and moral quality. Novels had the aim of making readers finer people.

The Victorian novel is the critical voice of the 19th-century British society, and this is also because its major authors are never the loyal servants of power: the novelist lays claim to a social role corresponding to the moral function which the novel purports to possess. The novelist, then, has recourse to an omniscient narrator, who judges, rewards or punishes the characters. The number of readers had multiplied over the years; in particular, advances in paper-making and in printing brought down the cost of book production, even though they remained expensive products – to overcome this obstacle, circulating libraries started loaning books at a modest price. The advantage of this extension of the market was however partly negated by the implicit censorship operated by the libraries.

Novità editoriali

Another important novelty was the widespread practice of serial publication, which also posed difficulties for the novelist’s creative freedom.

There were three ways of publishing novels:

• Publication in book form (mainly during the first period), which was in three volumes and was also very expensive (they were sold at a high price).
• Serialisation in a periodical (published in regular instalments).
• Serialisation in monthly parts at a low price (1 shilling – it was very successful). Novelists published 20 monthly instalments in 19 (the last one was double – it contained two episodes). This allowed the author to make changes to the plot and characters in the light of public response (‘commercial’ demands).

Features of the serial method: it created a unique intimacy between authors and their readers, because they lived with the characters, thus creating a long relationship. It gave an episode structure to the plot; it encouraged the creation of episodes and incidents; it also influenced the style; it led to an excessive length of books; it assumed the image of an ideal unified family as a readership group.

Mudie’s Select Library was the largest and most famous circulating library of the Victorian period, because of the economic method of distribution, according to which people bought books from the Select Library by paying a pre-book (a sort of booking of the book).

Sense of the present

Victorian novels must be considered as responses to this time of change, responses which were ambivalent, because some writers felt they need to engage against society, and other retreat from it and find a refuge in a stable past. Condition of English novels are directly engaged with the contemporary social and political issues, and with a particular and specific concern that is the social consequences of the industrial revolution in England. That’s why these novels are also called Industrial novels. We can say, then, that Victorian novels in which the sense of the present is stressed can be defined as Conditional novels, Industrial novels, all marked by social realistic descriptions. These novels share some features such as criticism of the effect of industrialism, the exploitation of children in factories, the abuse of child labour and the miserable condition of industrial working class.

The nineteenth century Britain was the high noon of the social realist novels and major Victorian writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot.

Condition of England novels

Some examples of these novels are:

• Elisabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855);
• Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846), Hard Times (1854), Bleak House (1852), Our Mutual Friend (1864);
• Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845).

The sense of the past

‘We who have lived before the railway were made, belong to another world […] railroads start a new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one…’. This sense of division, of belonging to two ages was strongly felt by some novelists who are concerned with the recent past of their society but also with their personal past. The sense of the past as a sense of the self: the bildungsroman.

Some writers in order to escape from the age they lived in looked back to the past, but this idea of the past must not be understood just from a chronological point of view: it is something personal, subjective, a sort of magic in which nostalgia had a fundamental role. In an age of rapid change, the individual had to re-orientate himself in relation to both past and present, and the result of this introspective tendency is an exploration of the continuities and discontinuities in the history of the self, often with autobiographical tones. These novels deal with continuities and discontinuities in time. The personal past is presented in order to find new meanings. That’s why many novels dealing with this sense of the past are bildungsromans: novels of formation or education, which follow the maturation process of the individual (how and why the individual develops from a psychological and moral point of view). Since memory plays an important role in these novels, we can say that Victorian novelists in this case felt the influence of Wordsworth; so, these novels deal with selfhood in a context of cultural crisis.

Examples of the ‘fiction of the self’

• Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853);
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874), The Mill on the Floss (1860).
• Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1846)
• Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847)
• Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861).

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

No single category can contain Dickens. He is the greatest Victorian novelist: his novels offer a unique interpretation of the age. In the 40 years of his writing life, he registered changing England in the succession of his books with wonderful vividness.

He began his literary career in the early 1830s; as a child he had been put to work in a blacking factory at the age of 12, after his father’s imprisonment for debt. As an office boy in a law firm he then became a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and this is when he started writing sketches of urban life (Sketches by Boz – due to his infant pronunciation of Moses as Boses). In 1836 he also married Catherine Hogarth, and began writing the first of the twenty monthly episodes of what was to become The Pickwick Papers.

Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1836) initiates a new era. He immortalises a stage-coaching England that was passing away and instead of the individual as hero he depicts the individual and private man as hero. It wasn’t planned to be a novel, but when he introduced Sam Weller (a cockney servant) in the fifth issue, its success was enormous. In particular, his denounce of the iniquities of that period’s legal system marked the first step towards the acquirement of the properties of a novel. The story takes place in a recent past, in an England which is still the England of the stagecoaches, the inns and a countryside unaffected by the Industrial Revolution; London, however, is already the cruel metropolis Dickens will always portray in his works. In The Pickwick Papers, however, the characters and London scenes still don’t contain the great indignation of his later works.

Dickens satisfied Victorian readers’ demand for realistic fiction: in fact, he always took the contemporary scene for inspiration, and he set his novels in contemporary England. In his works, he focuses on social problems and denounces the evils industrialisation; that’s why his novels are usually defined as ‘social novels’ or ‘humanitarian novels’. However, in reality Dickens was not a social reformer: that’s because he did not advocate and change – he described, he shaded lights on the squalor of the slums, in the children’s condition. It is important to say that Dickens’s works testified England’s shift from a rural country to an industrial one.

Pickwick Papers

Let’s consider Pickwick Papers: Pickwick is far from the aristocratical idol (typical of historical novels, full of war heroism), he’s an anti-aristocratic hero, since his heroism is private and domestic. Nothing is further from the heroic warrior than the plump figure of Mr. Pickwick. There’s an elevation of the private man and of his private life to honour in literature (all heroes were knights, people who took part in a war… now we have normal people, private men becoming heroes). Dickens, in this novel, deals with the values of the old world with irreverence, comic energy and vitality: that’s what gives power to the language he uses.

If we take a look at his last novel Our Mutual Friend, however, we can see it deals with the precariousness of urban living; comparing these novels, we can see the evolution of his writing, but also of its time. However, he’s still an urban writer – not just because he deals with the city, but because he writes in an urban way: in the city we consume impression in a rapid and quick way, what we perceive is what is real, and images and appearances are important; as a result, Dickens’ style is exaggerate and marked by comic exuberant. The descriptions of his characters are always rich in details, because they’re analysed from an external point of way (which, however, means also that there’s a lack of psychological details), giving the reader the idea of the character as round and, somehow, ‘real’. Dickens doesn’t create types: he creates individuals, even if some details are important in order to convey universal truths. He’s the first English novelist to place children at the centre of his picture. Entertainment and amusement are the main aims of his novels: he mingers human and pathos.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist was also published in novel instalments; the young hero’s story is characterised by coincidences, unexpected revelation and an overall tone of melodrama. In this novel we will find Dickens’s most overt and radical critique of British society.

In his novels of the 1840s, Dickens exploited every sort of novelistic sub-genre (Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Pictures from Italy…); the late 40s’s novels were the ones that sealed his reputation as a writer – he masters the art of constructing a story around a central theme, maintaining the variety of subjects, the digressions, the subsidiary episodes and the curious details. David Copperfield and Great Expectations were both examples of a Bildungsroman where Dickens abandons the use of omniscient narrator (first-person narration – the ‘lesson’ is linked to the succession of events and the reflection of the character). Pip in Great Expectations is a less than heroic character, whose destiny is forged for him by a set of circumstances. In David Copperfield there is a strong autobiographical element; David’s formation (his difficult childhood, his sentimental education, his choice to become a novelist) is illuminated by his relationship with a series of characters.